They parted after midnight with warm protestations of friendship. They were to see each other again. Geoffrey was to look his friend up in the Shadrack district as soon as his engagements permitted. But wherever _she_ went, he would follow her, were it to that possible continent or archipelago at the southern pole. So Lucius went back to the region of many spars and much rigging, and solaced his lonely evenings with the pensive strains of his violin, and pondered long and gravely upon that wondrous mystery of love which could befool even so healthy a nature as that of honest, open-hearted, plain-spoken Geoffrey Hossack. Love allied with music! ‘Yes,’ he thought, as he sighed over the long-drawn chords of an adagio, ‘_that_ is the fatal witchcraft.’ Anon came February, season of sleet and east winds, the month in which winter—after seeming, towards the end of January, to have grown genial and temperate, with even faint whispers of coming spring—generally undergoes a serious relapse, and plunges anew into hyperborean darkness, fog, tempest, snow. Lucius had passed the old house in the Shadrack-road almost every day since November (even when it lay out of his beat he contrived to walk that way), but had seen no more sign of human life about that dismal mansion than if it had been in Chancery; not even the old woman in a bonnet—not even a baker’s barrow delivering the daily loaf—not so much as a postman. He might almost have beguiled himself into the belief that the whole experience of that November evening—the old man—the pale poetic-looking girl—the marvellous collection of art treasures seen by the flickering light of a single candle—were the mere phantasmagoria of an overworked brain, a waking dream, the inchoate vision of a disordered fancy. He went twice every Sunday to a church that stood midway between his own house and the once regal mansion; a new church of the Pugin-Gothic order, with open seats, a painted window, other windows which awaited the piety of the congregation to be also painted, and a very young incumbent of the advanced type, deeply read in the lives of the saints, and given to early services. This temple was so small that Lucius fancied he could scarcely have failed to see Miss Sivewright were she a worshipper there. Sunday after Sunday, during the hymns, ancient and modern, he looked with anxious gaze round the fane, hoping to see that one interesting face among the crowd of uninteresting faces. Four out of five of the congregation were women, but Lucille Sivewright was not one of them. He began to resign himself to the dreary truth that they two were doomed never to meet again.